Saturday, July 20, 2013

Maybe
one of the reasons why truth finds it so difficult to emerge in life is
because humans fear the consequences if it does. If you have committed
some misdemeanour or crime, in private or public life, however much you
might be willing or happy for this to be exposed if committed by others,
you might want to look out for your own interests first and keep the
truth of your activities concealed. This
may sound obvious, but we wonder about the 'truth' of public life, and
the private life of significant others, and make great efforts to urge
openness and sincerity (or transparency as it were) from each other; and
yet we get confused or enraged because someone hasn't told us the truth
about something. Yet why be so surprised?

I’m not trying to defend
wrongdoing, I'm just saying, the obstacles in the path to truth are not
merely epistemological or procedural, but also social. If we really
want the human truth to come out - and quite possibly we do not since it
may also involve us and those we love - we might want to think about
amnesty's and domains of forgiveness as contexts for such revelations,
founded not on wishy-washy uber-liberal relativistic indulgence, but on
reflections upon our own complicity with the unethical, actual or
potential (unless of course we claim to be perfect). Otherwise, why not
openly acknowledge that the loss of truth is a price that we are willing
to pay for the threat of retribution remaining always active and in
place. Or acknowledge that if we want both, that is, if we want both
truth and retribution, that the only way to get this is through ever
more intrusive surveillance and policing powers to root out wrongdoing –
powers which we can just hope will themselves not be corrupt. I do not
doubt that the ultimate answer that would render the truth something
that wouldn’t wish to conceal itself is people just doing the right
thing in the first place. But this is a separate matter, the question of
how to achieve this complex and important. Nevertheless, in the
meantime, the truth is concealed and the role that fear of retribution
plays in this, I think, interesting.